Early Childhood Campus
Opened as a brand new facility in Fall 2014, the 5,000-square-foot Early Childhood Campus is home to the entire Bennett Day School community through the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 academic years for students up through 1st grade. Beginning in the fall of the 2016-2017 school year, the Chicago Flagship Campus will become home to students in SK and higher grades. At that time, the Early Childhood Campus will serve only our youngest students in the PreK and JK programs. This purposeful growth plan has enabled the school to build a warm and inviting community of founding families before expanding with a larger campus.
Spaces to Tinker in Small Groups, Gather as a Community, and Reflect Upon Student Work
Supplemented by JBL sound, AppleTV, and state-of-the-art Cisco Meraki wireless equipment in the TinkerLab and all classrooms, faculty and students can easily display and interact with images and media on the wall with side-by-side NEC short-throw projectors in the TinkerLab or via a classroom projector and dry erase wall — at Bennett Day School, technology is viewed as a tool to facilitate student learning and to enable students to understand how things work.
A critical component to student learning, and for a Reggio Emilia-inspired approach in particular, is to display student work at student height for reflection and interpretation, as shown in the pictures below. Also note that pieces of student work are not alike, a key indicator that the educational experience is individualized and differentiated for each student.
While students meet in their classrooms daily for Morning Meeting, the entire school gathers together for All-School Morning Meeting on Fridays so that students can present to each other what they have been working on in the prior week and to receive comments and take questions. This ‘real world’ experience of presenting one’s work and both giving and receiving constructive feedback is a critical piece of this collaborative approach to learning.